Florula Ceilanica

Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in the Indian Ocean is a biodiversity hot-spot, with over 3,000 endemic species of plants – not just native, but known only on the island. New to European science in the 1700s and 1800s, they are the focus of this university dissertation written by Professor Carl Peter Thunberg. In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, professors wrote the dissertations; the student’s job was to explicate and defend it and pay for its publication. SIL holds dozens of these botanical and zoological papers by the great systematist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) at the University of Uppsala and his student and successor Thunberg.